6/27/08

but he's right about arctic char. Get ready for prices to go up as demand does, especially once people realize it doesn't aromatize the house the way farmed salmon does. Plus it sounds so much nicer than trout.

for a great technique. Fava beans are in the Greenmarket right now, and eating them this way is like shelling peanuts. Rather than oiling them last night, I just soaked them, and that works even better.

6/23/08

with four friends and a consort due at the table in a little over two hours, but I just walked in with a bagful of paper and cat products and thought again of how happy it makes me to see this in our thoroughly urban foyer, a memento of the year of magical rethinking.

6/21/08

pretty good, not bad. But it must have been those feisty-fearing editors who would not let her say Virgin Mary. A margarita cannot get its hymen back. You would be drinking lime juice only, maybe with salt.

I hate it when I get sucked into the drool of Panchito -- the Italian expert who mistook a sociopathic dry drunk for a good ol' boy and now apparently has not noticed all the sushi in his faux homeland -- but the staycation aspect redeems it. No Tuscany for me this year.

To paraphrase Jay Leno, the approval rating is so low that if the sucker has dinner with his wife and daughters, he's the only one at the table who thinks he's doing a good job. And somehow I doubt those mugs are going to escalate in value in the time it takes history to transform shit into Shinola.

Funny, I was reading this and thinking all the contortions sounded sort of like what we went through at the CIA years ago when I took the "nutritional cuisine" course for a story for Health magazine. They had all these tricks for cutting the fat in vinaigrette etc., but inevitably, you just wanted to get out your handkerchief.

She was marketing. Would anyone have gone to the site if not for the purloined recipe? The best part of this, which is an alternative to the WSJ's piece, is the breakdown of candy consumers. I think I qualify as a Detached Occasionalist.

has hit the WTF level so many times it must be broken. The Big Dick's old company has done so much evil while taking billions to "support" the troops you would think it can't get any worse. But you'd be wrong. I can't get into our NYTimes account to link the full story, but I give them credit for tucking the Names of the Dead into the story, under the food shot, in the dead-trees edition: 4,093 identified. Go Fuck Yourself must really believe there are shopping malls in hell.

Beggars can be choosers in Mumbai. Fascinating story, but of course I have to quibble. Why is food inevitably described so imprecisely? None of my cookbooks have a recipe for "yellow curried gruel." And can gruel be carnivorous fare?

has been both disseminated and demystified. It always amazes me how amazed people are when they see how fast you can chill a bottle of Champagne in an emergency (learned it from a sommelier friend eons ago who always stayed after our New Year's open house to make pasta when the glogg was gone and the warm gift bottles were lined up on the counter).

6/16/08

Americans would elect their leaders on the basis of which one might possibly-perhaps-maybe be able to extricate them from a bankrupting war and provide health insurance and public transit instead. But no. We have to dick around in the cookie jar. I know why she steals. I cannot understand why the lapdogs run with the nonsense, election after election. We are ruled by the top of the food chain in a rotting banana republic. Why do we pretend Evita baked alfajores?

Shrimp never strikes me as a luxury food anymore; it would be a whole other story if the Man From Nantucket were serving foie gras with his apparently unfermented grape juice. And at least it wasn't arugula, and nobody got $400 haircuts. Did they? What's a million among journalists?

about the frenzy over tainted tomatoes, I have to admit I did just wash the sublime champagne mango I just bought at Gourmet Garage (still no bag reward). Crap on the skin goes straight into the flesh when you slice into fruit. And in a world where the preponderance of farmworkers and food handlers have no clean place to void, let alone wash up afterward, it's amazing the rich all over the planet are not brought to their knees before the porcelain throne every night. Shit doesn't just happen.

on the big white telephone. I think the state might have bigger things to worry about than people getting trashed on ice cream. That is rent-a-binge material. And so far bulimia is not a crime at any age.

Huge kudos to Gothamists for being able to read verbiage like "splendid and scrumptious new agrigoodies" and "agrilicious" without gagging themselves.

6/14/08

The Boy Wonder should probably get out his shit shield. Some years ago I pointed out that the chef's new apron was invisible, and a shilling underling unleashed a horde of feces-flinging comment monkeys.

of riding in the first car in the homecoming parade, serious stuff is being debated. Although I do wish Home Ec could go back to teaching the cash-strapped that beans and cornbread (or beans and tortillas) make a much more nutritious dinner than cereal and toast.

political comments can be dangerous. Follow one linking to a "favorite headline of all time," and the next thing you know you're deep in the paper's food section with jaw dropping over the ripped-off-the-wire hollow "features." And the awful realization that they use "Kentuckiana" down Louisville way. I still remember the slot who hated it so much he preferred "Indi-ucky."

is on the political blogs. Here, the post is adequate, the feedback exceptional. And it reminded me of my trip to Satur Farms a couple of years ago with a bunch of chefs, all of whom were most anxious to see the white asparagus growing and had to be tactfully informed that the absence of chlorophyll is what makes it white. It's buried in dirt.

I myself get exhausted reading his exhaustive output in multiple outlets every week, but he's clearly fried. ("Delicious," by the way, is no help at all to the thinking drinker in the Chilean aisle.) As an intervention, might I suggest what a very smart friend wondered of me: "What is your brain like on battery?"

6/12/08

For all the horrors of my childhood, I did grow up drinking artesian well water. Two years ago I met a hydrogeologist from out my way who said the water coming out of the ground around Tucson was hot to the touch because the wells had to be drilled so deep. And now it's even worse: "Arizona is out: It now imports all of its drinking water." How about a few more golf courses, or swimming pools, in a region where swamp coolers always outperformed air conditioners?

and a cartoonist will always say it best. For years I've been railing that American drivers are dinosaurs: Little tiny brains in ridiculously outsized bodies. And even the weightists can't take offense here -- I'm not even going to talk about "Cadillac bodies on VW frames."

Interesting revelation on who got the cellphones to pop the popcorn. I was gullible because my dad died from brain cancer and I suspect the worst. Which is why every time I see someone's head pulsing blue, I get queasy.

about the crappy waitress at Roberto Passon Sunday night. We almost ate here, for about the 12th time. (Just to clarify: I will go back another 12 times; the food's seriously good, especially when a woman is manning the brick oven.)

the world should need: cartoonists. Am I the last sitting idiot who didn't realize how/why Truman was vindicated by history? (In my defense: No one said anything in school about Japanese internment camps in Arizona, but my dad drove us past an abandoned one one summer to educate us. And people wrote him off as nuts.)

but this is actually quite good, and not just because a friend was involved in its creation. The writing was also missing that weird twee aspect so many manly men down there adopt when addressing a subject once relegated to the women's pages.

As usual, nobody sez it better about the "abbatoir" at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. But could someone please explain the newsworthiness of a drunk getting trapped in a bar? I feel like I'm back in Glenwood, Iowa, where a front-page story in the Opinion-Tribune would be about a guy building a condo for purple martins. (No link, either, because I don't want to encourage them.)

had a sense of irony with his encrusted skull. This is 4,295 levels of ridiculous. I don't care how much money you have. (Let's hear it for dead media: I spotted the coke holder in my daily paper. The print edition.) This, however, has style.

6/5/08

The danger of linking wildly after four cups of tea in the morning is that you can't get 'em all. I'll have more to say at the base camp on Sunday, but this take on the new French, in every sense of the term, was rather insightful.

drinking $7.97 Veramonte sauvignon blanc from Chile. I hear the wolf out on the horizon. . .

(And I don't think nonsubscribers can read these online, but the WSJournal today has two accidental-life-during-wartime stories: people planting vegetables instead of flowers for their own Victory Gardens, and women giving up pantyhose. This time, though, no one has to draw a seam up the back of her calves.)